The lips of the old man stiffened a little.
“It was his own fault....”
“Still ... thirty years is a long time.”
He knocked the ash from his cigar and looked at her sharply. “You mean that everything may have been forgotten by now?”
Olivia made a little gesture with her white, ringless hands. “Why not?”
“Because people don’t forget things like that ... not in our world, at any rate.”
Quietly, far back in her mind, Olivia kept trying to imagine this Horace Pentland whom she had never seen, this shadowy old man, dead now, who had been exiled for thirty years.
“You have no reason for not wanting him here among all the others?”
“No ... Horace is dead now.... It can’t matter much whether what’s left of him is buried here or in France.”
“Except, of course, that they may have been kinder to him over there.... They’re not so harsh.”